by Diana Clarke
“Keep ana?” I whispered.
“Anorexic,” said Mim. “Slang.”
“Wait,” I turned to Mim, frowning, confused. “This is a pro-anorexia meeting?”
Mim shrugged. “Is that okay?”
I didn’t realize that I had bitten through my tongue until I was swallowing my own blood. It almost tasted nutritious. I looked at Mim, so beautiful and angular as architecture, standing in the shadowy light, and I swallowed and said, “I guess.” After all, I didn’t want to get better. I didn’t want to gain weight. Maybe these were my people. I looked around at the dying girls, killing themselves with restraint, and I settled back into my chair, surrounded by birds of a feather, fasting together.
Penguins are said not to flock, but rather to huddle. In the coldest months, they starve, surviving on only their own body fat. They scrum like rugby players to warm themselves and those around them. They rotate, giving each bird a turn on the outside of the circle where the wind is cold and rough, and then a turn on the inside, where there is shelter and warmth. This is nice to think about.
In warmer weather, penguins hunt for food. They’re famished after a winter-long fast. Their huddle disperses, like strangers disembarking a bus, like their relationship was always one of convenience alone, and they head for the ocean to eat. A waddle of penguins standing on the shore will only wait for so long. When one becomes impatient or hungry enough, he will shove a friend into the water to test for predators. Only once he knows it’s safe in there will he join his brother. This is less nice, and also less surprising.
I leave Lara Bax’s cookie-cutter neighborhood, start off back to Lily’s place. She’s all I have and hers is the only place I have. There is nowhere else for me to go.
People go places, I know that. People go places to eat and to drink, to be around other people who go to places. Look here, at all of these people in this restaurant, sipping lattes made by liberal arts students who seem to be using foam as a creative outlet. Two girls, poised over their tiny table, phones carefully positioned in the air, a bird’s-eye view, their cameras flash, capture their coffee in a frame, and only then do the two sit, ritual over, and lift their mugs to drink.
I am so hungry, not even a canister of Tic Tacs to keep me lucid, and the world looks like a film. Like I’m sitting in the back row of the theater, alone, watching this old-timey classic, see how the actors look more human than humans. Act more human than humans. They never go to the bathroom! Never burp midsentence. Never stub a toe. Imagine being so good at your job! Being human!
This restaurant, so fancy it’s called itself a bistro. I laugh. It is full of diners. Families and friends tucked into booths, menus in hand, smiling. Happy to be eating together. To be sharing such an animal necessity. It’s beautiful, what humans have done with the biological need to eat. Unlike other animals, who claw others apart in order to fill their stomachs, who chase and kill, who scavenge and battle and plunder. Not humans. We smile around tables, cutlery politely in hand, napkins over laps. We share bites from forks, order an appetizer to sample, and we laugh, we tell stories, we bond over a meal. Something so human and so beautiful in masking how animal we are at the heart of it all.
I swallow rising bile.
Here, a fast-food hole-in-the-wall. People queueing down the block. The air is heavy as cream, and I inhale. There are cooks in the back, pulling baskets out of fryers so hot the oil is applauding. What a supportive environment! A couple take their cone of fresh fries and the boy lifts one, blows the heat from it, and sets it between his girlfriend’s teeth. Her eyes roll. That is how much she likes that greasy stick of potato. Or that is how much she likes her boyfriend.
A man, beard shaggy as a wet dog, ragged sweats, torn sweater. He sits on the sidewalk and holds a cardboard sign that says only: please. When I walk past, I try not to make eye contact, but he looks up, his eyes so blue. “Hungry,” he whispers.
I puke in the gutter, but my sick is just liquid neon, this fluorescent warning sign: you’ve gone too far! road end! turn around! go back! protect your own peace!
I wipe my mouth on my sleeve and continue.
29
2011 (22 years old: Lily 238 lbs, Rose 64 lbs)
One Saturday, I was sitting in bed staring at the ceiling, the way I always seemed to be. I was so well acquainted with it, the ugly white stucco that belonged in the ’70s, the mottled texture that looked like something edible, ice cream or frosting, something that hovered between liquid and solid, awkward like a friend of a friend at a party. I often imagined dipping my finger into it, the texture of cream, licking it clean.
I was doing just this, my head a-twirl, when I heard a thwack. The source of the sound: a blackbird splayed against my window. It hung, almost comically, for a moment, before falling.
I made my way downstairs, past my father, who hadn’t been sober since the funeral, who was passed out and snoring on the couch, beer still upright in hand.
The bird was a handful of feathers, unmoving, but when I crouched beside it, an eye opened, wild and afraid. Have you ever seen yourself in an animal? I have never been so familiar to me as when I saw that feebled creature.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Rose.”
Its eye, suspicious, helpless.
“I’m going to try to help, okay?”
I cupped my palms around the bird’s body and lifted it, nearly weightless, so fragile it barely existed.
“I’m going to carry you inside now, okay?”
Asking permission for each action seemed like the only way to level the imbalance of vulnerability. After each question, I waited, watched the bird’s eye, until I was certain that consent had been given.
“Okay, this is my house,” I told the bird. “That’s Dad.”
My father, perhaps roused by some flicker of parenting past, blinked awake.
“What’re you doing down here?” He rubbed his eye with his empty hand and then took a swig of beer.
“It’s my house, too, isn’t it?”
“Sure, sure.” He paused to scratch his chin, the stubble sounding like static. “What’s the time?”
“Noon. It’s Saturday. Lily will be home from college in a minute.” The bird, still held in my concave hands, let out a small chirp. Dad didn’t seem to notice.
“We got some food in the house?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Your sister can go to the store,” he said. “Will you tell her to pick up some beers?” He was in denial about his drinking, and he thought that if he ordered his booze in tangent to groceries, the two balanced each other out. Health and harm.
“You could tell her.”
He chuckled as if I’d said something funny.
“Dad, what do birds eat?”
“Birds?”
“Yeah, birds.”
“Worms. That’s how it goes, isn’t it? Early worm gets the, I mean, bird.”
“What if the bird is sick?”
“What?”
I closed the distance between us, the expanse of the living room, and lowered my hands for him to see. The bird, both eyes wide now, gurgled a little.
“Who’s this?” he said.
“I just found her. She flew into my window.”
“Flew inside it?”
“No, like, she crashed into the glass and fell.”
“She doesn’t look too good.”
“No.”
“Her wing broken?”
“Don’t know. What should I do?”
“Don’t know.”
We sat in quiet, staring at the crumpled creature. She looked back at us, expectant, the question in her gaze: Why aren’t you helping me? Why aren’t you saving my life?
The world’s worst paramedics, one starving, one drunk, we were still huddled over the bird when Lily arrived home.
“What’ve you got?” was the first thing she said, hanging her coat, tossing her keys on the counter. She loomed over us, my father and the bird and me. “That thing’s too far
gone,” she said.
“What?” I said. “What do you mean?”
“I mean it’d be kindest just to kill her.”
“No.” I stood, brought the bird into my chest. “What do you mean too far gone? She’s going to be okay. You want to just kill her? We can’t just kill her. Look at her!”
“Yes, we can,” said Lily. “She’s as good as dead.”
“Help me make something for her to eat.”
“She’s dead, Rose. Let her go.”
But I couldn’t. I took my winter scarf and wound it into a nest, then I set her in it, covered her trembling body with one end to keep her warm, and went into the garden to dig. In just minutes, I’d found two fat worms. They thrashed in my pinched fingers as I dangled them over the bird. She watched them writhe, interested, her beak opening and closing with want, but she didn’t seem able to reach for her meal.
“Lil!” I called. “Come help!”
Lily appeared on the stoop and watched me try to lower a worm into the bird’s waiting mouth.
“Even if you feed her that, she’s going to die.”
“Can you just help?” I held the struggling bug out to her. “If you hold the worm for her, I’ll hold her beak open.”
Lily wouldn’t. Her counteroffer was to knock the bird on the head with our father’s hammer. Something about her was different. She was sharper. Meaner. “Are you still dating Tony?” I said, looking for something to blame, like asking a toddler if she’d had her afternoon nap. At his name, Lily’s expression softened. Her hands found her stomach, cradled it, almost affectionate.
“Yes,” she said, so quiet she mightn’t have said it at all.
“Why?”
She didn’t respond. The bird didn’t eat. I shut her in the laundry room, the warmest room of the house, overnight. I kissed the tip of her beak. I promised her recovery. The next morning, when I went to check on her, she was dead.
It’s not until I walk past a grocery store that I realize what being alone means. I haven’t been alone, really alone, since before I was admitted.
The store is one of the expensive ones. Organic vegetables and food from other countries that woo every white person into thinking they’re cultured. Kimchi and kombucha, acai berries and goji berries and chia, matcha, quinoa, kale.
It has been a long time since I’ve been to a supermarket. I am always afraid that, confronted with so much food, my body might hijack my mind, might force me to take packets of snacks, pull the plastic open, gorge myself right there in the candy aisle. So I keep my eyes trained to the ground as I take armloads of chips and chocolates, a loaf of bread, a tub of peanut butter. These are the things I’ve seen Lily binge on. These are the things she will not resist.
When I pay, the cashier eyes me up. I can see the accusation in her eyes. You are not going to eat any of this.
“It’s not for me, obviously,” I tell her suspicious stare. I leave, panting but proud. See how I can shop for groceries! See how adult I can be!
When I get back to Lily’s place, I empty the cupboards of Lara Bax products, toss them in the trash, and squirt dish detergent over the top, untouchable. Then I restock the pantry with the new snacks, so appetizing, so enticing. I dust my hands at the job well done.
Next, I take the landline from its hammock on the wall and tap Mim’s cell number. I’m barely me now. I’m watching myself from a distance. These actions cannot have consequences! The phone rings once, twice, and for a third time before I hang up. What would I even say to her? To Mim? Thank you for the letters? Then the phone, still cradled in my hands, starts to ring. I stab the off button and hang it back on the wall. The floor seems to be moving, like standing on a carousel. I close my eyes. I count the things that are real: Lily’s apartment, the phone, the dying plants. But when it comes to the intangible, I’m not so sure. The memory of the grocery store? The bathroom at Lara Bax’s? I check the cupboards and, sure enough, real groceries. The ones I had just bought. Reality, I think, isn’t any more real than fantasy. Reality is just a collective fantasy. Nothing is real and nothing isn’t real.
I am tired. I am hungry. I am hungry! I sit, I cry, I swallow. My pulse, too slow, like an instant replay of a pulse, the referees searching for errors. It’s slower than a clock. I let it rock me to sleep.
The very idea of anorexia is contradictory. Us thin girls indulge in deprivation. We feel fullest when starving. Our own slow deaths give us life. By renouncing our bodies, we hope to find our identities. We yearn to be visible as we annihilate ourselves.
Lily wakes me with both hands around my biceps, shaking and shaking, shouting my name.
“What?” I say.
“Fucking Christ, Rose, I thought you were dead.”
“Dead?”
“You look like a dead person sitting there like that.”
I wipe crusted drool from my chin and squint at my sister, who is blurred as a bad photograph. I rub fists against my eyes, hard, and don’t stop until my vision whitens.
“What time is it?”
“Nearly midnight,” says Lily.
“Where’ve you been?”
“Where’ve you been?” says Lily.
We’re both in trouble.
“You went to a YourWeigh meeting,” says Lily.
“You had sex with Phil in his wife’s house while his wife was there.”
An impasse. We watch each other’s faces, which is to say, we watch our own faces.
“Let’s just forget about tonight,” says Lily, running her fingers through my hair. “I don’t have the energy for a fight.”
She doesn’t? Can’t she feel how sparse my hair has become? Can’t she see how I’ve grown even thinner? How I need her help?
“He told me he loves me,” Lily says, aglow and buttery. “It’s the first time he’s said it back. He cried, Rose. He actually cried.”
“Yes, well, so do infants.”
“No, but he’s a man, like, oh my god, he is such a man.”
“Because he’s a dick, you mean?”
“He told me he’s decided to leave her. Lara Bax, I mean. For me! Apparently, she’s been just terrible to him since her social media stuff took off.”
“You mean he’s leaving her because she’s successful?”
“She’s barely been paying him any attention and they haven’t had sex in weeks.”
“He told you that?”
“Rose, he told me he thinks I’m the one. The one!”
I swallow. “He hurts you.”
“Not really. I mean, yeah, he does, but it’s in our contract. I agreed to it.”
“Contract?” I blink. My sister, who? “Do you like feeling abused?”
Lily snorts. “Do you?”
What I want to do: take Lily’s new skinny shoulders and shake her until whichever ball bearing has come loose in her mind pinballs back into place.
What I do: fill a glass with water and begin to fill the flowerpots. One, I notice, has a small green sprout growing hopeful from the darkened soil. It is so important to support the ones we love. I sit beside my sister and take her hand in mine.
“Lily,” I say. “I understand that you want to be loved. But this is an abusive relationship.”
“How would you know?”
“He’s manipulative. He’s controlling. He’s making you diet. He’s making you wear makeup and get your hair done and get a tan! He’s a liar and a cheater. He hits you.”
She shrugs her cardigan, my cardigan, off her shoulders and folds it over the back of a chair. It lies dead. She hasn’t stretched it, because it fits her just fine. Her body is shrinking so quickly.
“Show me your back,” I say.
“What?”
“Take your shirt off. Show me your back.”
She crosses her arms. “No.”
“Show me.”
“No.”
I stand, vertigo swarms. I grab Lily’s shirt by the hem.
“Stop,” Lily says, trying to writhe free, but I’ve al
ready lifted the T-shirt enough to glimpse gashes, crisscrossed over her skin, the blood now dried a dark brown. “Stop,” Lily says again.
Silent, I unclasp the corset that is binding Lily’s body and drop it to the floor. I go to the kitchen, run the faucet until the water warms, and wet a dish towel.
“Come here,” I say.
Lily does.
“Take off your shirt,” I say.
Lily does. The plane of her back is slashed with red. I dab at the shredded skin gently, pressing the towel against each laceration, cleaning her body. Lily hisses through her teeth at the sting. Once most of the blood has been cleared, I notice that her mole, the mark that has separated us our whole lives, is gone. Taken off by a shard of glass. I run my fingers over its old land, and Lily shivers.
“Question for a question?” says Lily.
We haven’t played the game in years. I nod.
“Why now?” she says. “Why have you decided to save me now?”
The question has such an obvious answer, I squint at her. “What do you mean?” I say. “You’re in an obviously abusive relationship, Lil. You’ve lost, like, half your body weight.”
“I’ve been in worse pain than this, you know. Things have been worse than this.”
“What?”
“You’re recognizing your pain in me, I think,” she says. “Now that I’m losing weight, you’re recognizing it, because that’s how you always dealt with your pain. But you had no idea before; you’ve never known when I’m hurting.”
“You mean at high school?”
She shrugs. “Your question.”
“What?”
“You get to ask a question.”
“Right. Okay. Why Phil? I mean really. You don’t get to just tell me you love him. You’re smarter than that.”
Lily sighs. “I mean, I know there are parts of our relationship that aren’t ideal. I’m not an idiot, Rosie. I know it’d be better if he weren’t married, for example. I know it’d be better if I were more into his, you know, his kinks.”
“Violence isn’t a—”
“Can I just answer the question, please?”
